How significant is religious faith in Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir, Night?

"Unconditional faith in an all-powerful-all-merciful God is shaken to the core by the ubiquitous brutality of the concentration camps."

In the memoir, Night, as the young narrator, Eliezer, struggles for survival amidst the horrors of the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel, the author, grapples with the question of how an oppressive environment can affect an individual’s faith and ethics. Mainly through the use of night as a motif and imagery of light and darkness, Wiesel captures the power of cruelty in corroding faith in mankind and general goodness of the world. As Eliezer’s initial unconditional faith in an all-powerful-all-merciful God is shaken to the core by the ubiquitous brutality of the concentration camps, the resultant disillusionment can be seen as negative bildungsroman.

Elie Wiesel the author and the book jacket

The anaphoric “Never shall I forget” not only establishes a sombre mood, but also serves to illuminate the use of night as a significant motif throughout the memoir. The harrowing, “Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night …” (45), encapsulates the symbolic darkness occasioned by the oppressiveness of the Holocaust. The silence of the night, one would hope, would bring with it the respite much needed by Eliezer and his fellow prisoners, but it instead causes unbound anguish as Eliezer takes it to be symbolic of a God negligent of his people in their hour of need. Through a series of rhetorical questions and diction that portrays rebellion, Eliezer’s shifting faith in God comes to the fore:

Why, should I bless Him? In every fibre I rebelled. Because He had thousands of children burned in His pits? Because in His great night he had created …so many factories of death? How could I say to Him: Blessed art Thou, Eternal, Master of the Universe, Who chose us from among the races to be tortured day and night, to see our fathers, our mothers, our brothers, end in the crematory? Praise be Thy name, Who hast chosen us to be butchered on Thine alter? (78)

All around him, Eliezer is surrounded by despondency so debilitating that it would tax even biblical Job. This crisis of faith, this angst, is epitomized by the hanging of the young pipel, “the sad eyed angel” who “was loved by all” (75), an act that, to Eliezer’s tormented soul, is testament to the absence of God; an absence rhetorically expressed thus: “Where is God now? Where is He? Here He is. He is hanging here on this gallows….” (77).

Buchenwald, April 16, 1945 (close up of Elie Wiesel)

It is in the context of this untold suffering and uncertainty in the concentration camps that Eliezer has a crisis of faith making him ruminate: “how can anyone believe in this merciful God? (88). The full scale of this sense of doubt becomes all the more poignant when we consider that God and faith had been a way of life for Eliezer to whom, hitherto the concentration camps, life without God and prayer would have been beyond the realm of his very existence as he ponders: “Why did I pray? A strange question. Why did I live? Why did I believe? (14) So pervading is this debasement that one of his fellow prisoners, the rabbi, Akiba Drumer, from a little town in Poland feels that “God is no longer with [them]” and like Eliezer, he too wonders: “Where is the divine Mercy?” (88).

Lest we miss the point, it is important that we see Eliezer’s anger within the confines of faith and religion. To Eliezer, although questioning God presents a crisis of faith, it cannot be seen as abandonment of faith. To the contrary, it is a reaffirmation of that very faith. Wiesel seems to posit that to question God is not to deny his existence for even in his darkest hour, the narrator, Eliezer, always reaffirms his faith by turning to God for “in spite of [him] self, a prayer rose in [his] heart, to that God in whom [he] no longer believed” (103).  In deed, Elie Wiesel makes it clear that to give up on God is to lose all: the very will to live:

Poor Akiba Drumer, if could have gone on believing in God, if he could have seen a proof of God in this Calvary, he would not have been taken by the selection. But as soon as he felt the first cracks forming in his faith, he had lost his reason for struggling and had begun to die. (88)

Perhaps, Elie Weisel’s somewhat inexplicable Holocaust survival, despite his crisis of faith, is paradoxically attributable to his faith in God for throughout his travails he remains cognisant and adherent to his religious upbringing of never losing “faith, even when the sword hangs over your head” (42).

In the end the symbolic darkness expressed in the memorable, if ominous, line: “Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night” (45), characterises a dark part of human history; a negative bildungsroman that leaves a bitter taste of disillusionment in the goodness of the world and mankind.

While faith in God is vital in giving hope and meaning to an otherwise futile situation, the psychological trauma lingers on. Even after being rescued from Buchenwald, a look in the mirror throws that trauma back to Elieza: “From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed at Eliezer” (126). And just as Eliezer cannot escape this ugly image of rot, putting aside the merits or demerits of using a fictionalised narrator in a memoir of such great standing, Elie Wiesel achieves the remarkable feat of making us confront head-on an ugly and painful predatory side of the human nature.


by Patrick Kariku

Copyright © Patrick Kariku, 2010

Note: the edition of the memoir referred to in this essay is: WIESEL, ELIE. Night. Middlesex England: Penguin Books, 1981